GeneWatch UK PR: GM crops a poor choice for Britain

12th June 2013

Responding to the report in the Independent today that UK
Environment Secretary Owen Paterson will lobby the EU to weaken GM crop
regulation (1), GeneWatch UK highlighted that developing and planting GM crops
is a poor investment choice for Britain. A new YouGov poll highlighted today
that 35 per cent of the public don't want to eat GM foods (2) and a new study found
that pigs fed on GM animal feed had inflamed stomachs (3).

"Why should we pour
money into developing and growing GM crops for which there is no market?"
said Dr Helen Wallace, Director of GeneWatch UK "The idea that GM crops survive droughts and floods is a fantasy
promoted by PR companies, no such GM crops exist despite 30 years of wasted
investment in this area. GM crops tolerant to herbicides are bad for the
environment, bad for famers and expose consumers to increasing levels of the
weedkillers sprayed onto these crops".

The main GM crop entering Britain as animal feed is Roundup
Ready GM soya produced by US company Monsanto to be tolerant to the herbicide
glyphosate (brand name RoundUp). Herbicide-tolerant GM crops have led to an
explosion of herbicide-resistant superweeds in the United States and South
America and increased use of weedkillers (4). Similar herbicide-tolerant crops
have previously been rejected in the UK due to adverse effects on wildlife
found in the Field Scale Evaluations published in 2004. Recent studies have
reported adverse effects on Monarch butterflies in the USA associated with the
loss of habitat due to blanket spraying with RoundUp (5).

Despite more than 14 thousand field trials conducted in the
United States, only herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant (Bt) crops have
reached the market (6). This is because GM is a poor tool to create complex
traits such as drought-tolerance or increased yield in plants, which are
influenced by many different genes. Conventional breeding, which can be speeded
up with modern technologies such as genome sequencing, has been much more
successful and has provided a high economic return for countries opposed to planting
GM crops such as Scotland (7).